Movie Review: Cache (2005)

Our lives project from the stories we tell about ourselves and our worlds, not just to others but to ourselves, as well. We form routines and make assumptions to make our lives flow more efficiently and to give ourselves some inkling of understanding and intuition about our universe, and the foundation for these assumptions and routines are myths about what our world is like and who we are within it. Some of these myths are more dependable than others: something thrown into the air will fall down, a dark and cloudy sky brings rain. Some are less reliable: if I walk under a ladder then bad things will happen, or if I am nice to someone that person will be nice in return. And some are downright dangerous: I drive better when I'm drunk, or Japanese people should never be trusted. The assumptions, prejudices, and routines remove the thought process from our lives, freeing us up so that we can live lives of action rather than constant decision-making.

That's neither an entirely bad nor an entirely good thing. Certainly, it's good for our survival to be able to assume that a barking dog might be dangerous without having to experiment first. Many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities have been missed, I'm sure, by people who pondered first rather than leaping ahead. Too much thought can lead to self-doubt, insecurity, depression, laziness, fear, and second guessing. Too little can lead to tunnel vision, stereotypes, mistakes, and a lack of imagination.

Among other things, Michael Haneke's voyeuristic mystery film Caché (sometimes translated Hidden) is about the power of establishing a fact and moving on. Whether these facts are truthful is irrelevant in a complicated world where truth is a graduated scale rather than an all-or-nothing quality. What is instead important is our ability to accept the truthfulness of a fact and all that it entails--its consequences and correlatives--and continue on with life. An inability to move on is a plague on the mind that prevents further progress by calling into question the truthfulness of everything else we think we know. Truth is a frangible house of cards. When the strength that supports one piece of it dissolves, we realize that the entire structure is built on collapsible prayers.

At the center of Caché is Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil), a late middle aged, successful family man and television personality who may or may not have told a couple lies when he was a six-year-old boy. Faced with the possibility that his parents might adopt the orphaned son of two Algerian farmhands, the only child of this wealthy French provincial farm family fabricates two lies about the older usurper. First, he tells his mother than the boy coughs up blood, a rather strange lie suggestive of tuberculosis which, in my opinion, encourages sympathy for the orphan rather than repulsion. When that lie--which perhaps wasn't even a lie, since Georges's adult flashbacks of the incident seem rather realistic--fails, Georges convinces the boy that his parents want him to behead the grumpy family rooster. When the boy obliges, young Georges tells his mother that he maliciously slaughtered the cock in order to terrorize him. The mother takes the bait, and the boy is unwillingly hauled off to an orphanage.

Georges confesses these sins to his wife (Juliette Binoche) late in the film, after much denial and evasion, many nightmares and threats. What, however, is the nature of these sins? Are they really that unforgivable? Georges is six years old, a spoiled only child who quite naturally resists having to share his family and his life with another kid. His behavior is selfish, but it's understandable. It's also something that a little good parenting, communication, and discipline could easily solve. His first lie, like I said, is bizarre--not the sort of lie a child seeking to vilify someone would invent. Was it a lie? Was it something he saw in a bad dream that he somehow thought was the truth at one point? Did he really see the Algerian boy coughing up blood, and did this frighten him? Was his opposition to the Algerian not based in selfishness but in fear? A flashback of the rooster beheading scene--presented as one of Georges's nightmares--presents the possibility that maybe the boy was trying to scare him, yet Georges later confesses that these were his lies. The rooster slaying couldn't have caused too much damage, considering that an old rooster can't be that valuable, that the Algerian would be capable of explaining his side of the story, and that Georges would have to do an impressive bit of acting afraid in order to convince his mother that he was traumatized.

All this, plus consider that Majid, the Algerian, was the truly traumatized boy. At age eight, his parents are murdered by the French police in the 1961 Paris massacre. This is the event that causes the boy to be orphaned. Killing an old rooster, having tuberculosis--are these really crimes unpardonable enough to cause potential adoptive parents to heartlessly abandon a pitiful child to a flawed welfare system? Who is the greater sinner: Georges for accusing the boy, or Georges's parents for condemning him on shallow evidence?

Or is it more likely that when Georges confesses to his frustrated wife, he leaves out crucial information about his indictment of Majid? When he first mentions the childhood event after a long duration of feigned ignorance, he claims to have forgotten all the details. These details emerge only much later, after all threats have been removed and confessing is merely a choice rather than a necessity. Does he confess only to what he is capable of admitting? Are these two lies merely the tip of a vast, hulking iceberg of guilt? Or are these formative lies, which eventually destroyed a man's life, all that is necessary to plague a man's conscience?

Two lives emerge from the slaying of the rooster. Georges continues to be the spoiled only child of a wealthy, white family. He is cared for, well fed, looked after, and educated. He becomes an intellectual. He lands a high profile job as a book critic on public television, a successful, beautiful wife who is a publisher, and a luxuriant apartment in Paris. He barrels through life forming opinions, entertaining friends, and making decisions without doing much thinking. He darts out into the street without looking and is almost hit by a black bicyclist, who he then violently accuses of being an idiot. He passes through life telling unnecessary white lies to his friends and his wife. And when he walks by a man who is standing in plain sight videotaping him--the Algerian he knew decades ago, most likely--he doesn't even notice. He is all action, no thought. He needn't think because he already knows everything.

Majid's life follows a much different course. Hauled off to the orphanage, he must fend for himself, receiving bad food and shoddy living conditions. His education is poor. He has a son, but perhaps his wife leaves him or dies. He lives in a small, cluttered, subsidized apartment in an ugly hall. And regrets about what he could have had, pains about the education and life he almost received, unquenchable anger and nausea at the thought of Georges's misdeeds haunt him for the rest of his life, until the exhausted depression drives him to a bloody suicide.

On a certain broad level, Caché is a film about racism in France and its effects on a certain generation of whites and Algerians who are promised equal lives but receive quite different fates. Featuring the children of Georges and Majid, who cross paths in the film's unusual end scene, the film points to the legacy that the next generation will inherit. On a very specific level, Caché presents itself as a mystery about voyeurism. Though Georges lives in the public spotlight, his life becomes unsettled when he begins receiving extensive videotapes of his front door. The tapes point to the fact that he is being examined, and for the first time they force him to examine himself. This examination unleashes his memory of his long buried sins; a thoughtful pause highlights the crooked card on which his shaking house of cards is built--the fact that his life of privilege that he takes for granted is undeserved. The producer of the videotapes is never revealed, but the most likely culprit is Majid (Maurice Bénichou), who nevertheless denies guilt.

This crux is the thematic center of the film. More important than racism or voyeurism is the question of guilt, an obstacle which prevents us from plowing forward on our sure-headed paths of assumption and routine. Guilt forces us to admit that something in the way we perceive or once perceived the world is wrong. Guilt tells us that we do not always act according to truth. A mysterious childhood event creates one child who cannot stop pondering the numerous possible universes of truth and another who pigheadedly insists upon his way or the highway. When the child who thinks finally acts, the man who acts must finally stop to think.

Michael Haneke's style is a cinema of "insistent questions" and uneasy answers, and perhaps in no other film is this style more fluidly perfected--nor, perhaps, as frustrating. Caché is presented as a mystery, yet it lacks the evidence to firmly support any possible solution. The film achieves the provocation of thought that it sets out to accomplish, but it does so in the most purposely unentertaining of fashions. The acting is solid but unspectacular (Annie Girardot is most interesting in a very brief role as Georges's remorseful-looking old mother, who betrays no word of guilt despite the tears her eyes cannot hold back), and the cinematography is bright and antiseptic. There is no score or soundtrack. Caché is a thoughtful and intriguing film, but not a particularly stirring or enjoyable one.

Caché (2005)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou)
6/10

Movie Review: The White Ribbon (2009)

When the wealthy, landowning baron (Ulrich Tukur) of the tiny German town Eichwald rises in church to announce to the congregation that an evil person lives secretly amidst them, the accusation is both alarming and relieving. A dastardly prank has left the town doctor (Rainer Bock) severely injured, and an unknown offender has recently kidnapped the baron's young son (Fion Mutert), violently thrashed him to the point of bleeding, and left him hanging upside down and naked in a mill. To know that a person would be capable of such ill will is a horror, but to hope that a careful investigation might discover and eradicate the culprit, restoring the town to peace, is a relieving prospect.

Michael Haneke, however, is a filmmaker who creates mysteries. He does not solve them. His films require the viewer to draw the proper conclusions, and they often force the viewer to think twice about whether the questions he's asking--the suspense he's caught up in--are even the relevant questions. Is something greater at stake? Is something else going on? Anyone expecting a startling twist and a detailed revelation at the end of Das weiße Band, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Band) will be disappointed, but those familiar with Haneke's "cinema of insistent questions" will walk away with a horrifying glimpse of pervasive, cyclical violence.

Set in 1913 on the eve of the First World War, The White Band plays out in a context of societal violence. A war-stained empire was primed to proudly, patriotically enter what would be the bloodiest conflict in human history. Their children would grow to become the generation of Nazis. Antisemitism had already threaded itself through the Protestant Christian culture, and all of the country's misfortunes could easily be thrust upon a scapegoated minority. This historical setting has little to do with the specifics of the parochial drama that unfolds in the film, but considering that the movie is Haneke's first feature film to not take place in contemporary times, this historical context is important to note.

Specifically, however, The White Band is a depiction of individual sins and their ability to expand into community, national, and global evils. The baron describes one sinful criminal and the community believes him. I, too, found myself suspecting the unlikeliest of suspects, a polite young school teacher (Christian Friedel) who is seen fishing in the river after the doctor's horse trips over a "nearly invisible, thin, but very strong wire" tied between two trees and who is seen whipping a horse immediately after the baron's son is discovered to have been thrashed. I think, given Haneke's precise style, these clues are intentional red herrings, and suspecting the mild mannered teacher (who is also the narrator) also conforms to the mystery movie convention of the perpetrator being the most unlikely suspect. An additional reason to suspect him is the reason that the community would likely suspect him if the film had taken place twenty or thirty years later: with his dark, curly hair, his wire frame glasses, and his intellectual misfit manner, he is rather very Jewish. That he remains innocent in a town where almost no one is and that he ultimately leaves the town never to return again is a statement against the vilification of Jews, proof that goodness can survive in a hostile environment and that using irrational means to create and rout out enemies is no way to solve the real problem of evil.

The baron may be willing to scapegoat, but each of the townspeople, with few exceptions, possess their share of sin. With sparse, meticulous scenes divided amongst a large, impressive ensemble cast, Haneke illustrates a pervasive ill will, terrors and hypocrisies that lash out in every direction. The doctor appears to be a kindly old widower, yet he sexually abuses his fourteen year old daughter Anna (Roxane Duran), who each day looks more and more like her mother. He maintains an illicit affair with his hardworking, supportive neighbor (Haneke regular Susanne Lothar), but then rejects her with humiliating, cruel insults after having sex with her over the sink. Who would set a trap to kill him and his horse? Perhaps a local villain, but more likely his own daughter, who watches the accident from the doorway and, unlike her younger brother Gustav (Thibault Sérié), does not seem grieved by the mishap. The trap would be an indirect way to retaliate against a powerful, dominating oppressor, a way to end her years of incestuous rape. Given her maturity, her inheritance, and the dependability of her neighbor, she would also not have much to lose and plenty to gain. This is, of course, only my theory.

The film details many indirect responses to abuses of authority. In an unequal, undemocratic relationship, the submissive party when wronged has few safe recourses to retaliation. Revenge is therefore either carried out anonymously, is self-inflicted, or is redirected to a third, less powerful party. When the baron's neglectful supervision of the workplace conditions on his farm leads to the death of an older woman, the woman's son avenges the death and the baron's minimal response to it by destroying the baron's cabbage patch, a symbolic act which means, "If you don't pay up, I'll cut your cabbage (money) for you." His action speaks words without him needing to speak up. When the pastor's oldest daughter Klara (Maria-Victoria Dragus) is humiliated by her father in front of her classmates simply for having fun during recess, she silently slips into his office and impales his parakeet with a pair of scissors. "You take away my joy, I'll take away yours," the gesture symbolizes. Unprovable deeds of anonymous revenge are the most directly satisfying but also the most likely to be discovered.

Others direct violence against themselves because it gives them a sense of control, feeling, and action that harms no one else in the process. When the pastor's son Martin (Leonard Proxauf) is beaten and humiliated by his father for staying out late, he walks along a high, precarious bridge banister, tempting God to kill him. If he dies, his religious conviction tells him that he deserves his punishment; if he survives, then he knows that God has forgiven him. The panicked school teacher intercedes and exacts a promise from the boy that he will no longer punish himself with such dangerous existential crises. Later, the husband of the dead farmer woman hangs himself, his only escape after having lost his job during the controversy following his wife's death. The night before, one of the baron's barns (possibly the one his wife died in, though I'm not certain) burned to the ground. Did the old man burn the barn down and then kill himself in remorse? Or is the murderous, kidnapping villain also an arsonist? That mystery is never solved.

The baron is the most obvious source of corrupt power in the film. The cruel, incestuous doctor receives the most intimate examination. But the most squeamishness-inducing monster in the film is the pastor (Burghart Klaußner), who rules over a silent wife and a brood of creepy children. The pastor never ceases to remind his young children that they are mortal sinners, that they have failed him, and that they are destined for hellfire unless they change their terrible ways. When the children return home late one evening after spending the day supporting Anna, whose father just nearly died, the pastor reminds them of how disappointing they are, sends the entire family to bed without dinner, makes plans to beat them with a switch, and attaches the titular white ribbons to them to remind them that they once were pure despite their straying. It is soon after the canings that the baron's young son is kidnapped and thrashed. Did the overly disciplined children direct their vengeance against the spoiled, happy child? Did their inability to stand up against their oppressive father cause them to gang up on a small child?

The pastor sees his teenage son's sullenness as proof of masturbation, and after detailing the horrid fate that awaits him if he continues to abuse himself, the father begins to tie the boy's hands to his bed frame at night. Trust, free will, decision making, and privacy play no role in an authoritarian dictatorship. The rulers make the decisions, and everyone else obeys.

The most horrifying act of violence is one that happens late in the film. After the doctor dismisses his lover, she threatens to do something that will make him feel sorry but then quickly admits that he probably wouldn't care anyway. Soon afterward, her young Down Syndrome child (Eddy Grahl) is found blinded and beaten in the woods with an attached note: "The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation" (Num 14:18). A premonition from one of the pastor's daughters suggests that his kids may have something to do with this horrendous crime, yet it seems unlikely that the children would leave such a note. Assuming that no one would have any reason to punish the gentle child, one must assume from the note that the punishment is directed against his father. The father of the unmarried woman's child is never stated, but one can easily assume that the doctor, her long-term lover, is responsible. Is harming his son what she means by making him feel sorry? And is she right in assuming that he--who has a legitimate, healthy son and daughter--wouldn't care? Does she punish herself and her innocent son more than him in this misdirected path of revenge?

As town doctor, the man caresses and cares for the boy who may be his son as the tortured mother looks on. In a following scene she hastily commandeers a bicycle from the school teacher, claiming that she has discovered evidence of the perpetrator who has committed all of the crimes and she must rush to the police station immediately to tell what she knows. With her son evidently locked up inside, she disappears and is never seen again. When the townspeople gain access to her abandoned house, they find no trace of the boy. After harming him, has she put him out of his misery with a mercy killing? Did guilt over her horrible, senseless crime force her to flee the city and her old life?

The doctor and his family also disappear abruptly the same day. This is treated as a mystery of the highest order, and the narrator describes an unlikely story of the doctor and his lover fleeing together, having successfully pulled off all the capers. Why might the doctor have actually left with his daughter and son? Could it be that he had impregnated his own daughter and needed to escape discovery and shame? Did the neighbor kill them and bury them in the yard? Did he kill his daughter giving her an abortion? (A haunting midnight scene about "ear piercing" suggests the possibility of late night abortions.)

Haneke leaves many unanswered questions at the end of The White Ribbon, but the likeliest scenario points not to one evil influence but a sphere of conflicting, misdirected evils. The school teacher announces his belief that the pastor's children are likely responsible for the crimes only to be denounced by the pastor, who--despite constantly berating and punishing his children for their ungodly behavior--thinks it impossible that pure children could be responsible for monstrosities. The children are likely responsible for some of the crimes, but the town has no small share of monsters. Even minor characters in small, tangential scenes reveal seething threads of jealousy, sexual infidelity, abuse, and contempt.

The baroness (Ursina Lardi) moves to Italy with her son after the boy is injured a second time by jealous peers. She explains to her husband that she can no longer live in a society ruled by hypocrisy, hatred, and oppression. Would she really find solace in Italy, or are these vices a worldwide epidemic? The film does not answer this question.

The movie does, however, provide brief glimpses of hope. The schoolteacher and his nursemaid girlfriend Eva (Leonie Benesch)--both outsiders to the town--provide a pure, progressive, compassionate love story to contrast the ugliness surrounding them, though innocents such as them were likely the first to be victimized in the Holocaust or crushed under fascism. The doctor's wide-eyed son, who has just discovered death, remains innocent, though age will likely corrupt him one day, and one of the pastor's young sons, who raises a wounded bird and then gives the bird to his father in sympathy when his parakeet is murdered by Klara, is capable of selfless acts. One of Haneke's most admirable skills is in rounding out even the most despicable of his villains: the pastor's face as he receives the gift from his son is one of heartfelt redemption and sadness. The pastor may be a cruel and manipulative autocrat, but even he mourns the death of a joyful bird.

Stunningly captured in deeply saturated black and white, The White Band's cinematography by Christian Berger evokes the tiny postcard paintings of forests, carriages, and snow-frosted church steeples found on the wallpapered walls of old people's parlors. The photography paints a horrifying tale with beautiful, stark images. Attention to detail is superb; the film authentically feels a century old. The nuanced acting, buried in ambiguities in secret passions, is superb throughout; even the many young child actors possess genuineness. The White Ribbon is one of Michael Haneke's greatest films, a mystery that reveals itself to be a horror film once one realizes that the mystery is not much of a mystery at all. Evil is not carried out by elusive masterminds. Evil is everywhere, breeding like a virus and burning like a fever.

The White Ribbon
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Burghart Klaußner, Rainer Bock, Christian Friedel)
9/10

Movie Review: Time of the Wolf (2004)

Michael Haneke's Les Temps du Loup (Time of the Wolf or Year of the Wolf) is perhaps his least regarded and least discussed film for good reason. The movie mistakes pretension for seriousness, with a meandering, enigmatic plot that never begs any interesting questions, a large ensemble of loosely sketched characters, and none of the horror, suspense, or cinematic thrills that typically mark the post-apocalyptic genre. Michael Haneke believes that his film is the most meaningful of an overdone genre, yet none of its cursory themes ever take hold and at the most fundamental level it fails to resonate, entertain, or provoke.

Of all genres, the post-apocalyptic fantasy is perhaps the format that carries the most symbolic weight. Night of the Living Dead is an intense examination of anarchy and how self-interest, survival, and teamwork do not always intersect. Serendipitously, it is also a statement about race relations. Children of Men explores xenophobia and the nihilism of having no future, and in a profoundly moving climax it juxtaposes the universal reverence of creating life with mankind's thoughtless pursuit of destruction. Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead both satirize mindless consumerism and lifeless routines. Day of the Dead, 28 Days Later, Starship Troopers, and 28 Weeks Later all present horrifying depictions of military rule, fascism, and war. The Road examines trust and sacrifice. The Road Warrior, and its most rudimentary, is a condemnation of oil dependence. I could go on, but the list would be very long. My point is that most dystopian films criticize some destructive element of society, be it mass media, group thinking, anti-environmentalism, drugs, or what have you. And most of these films also manage to be exciting, in fact some of the most exciting of all films.

Time of the Wolf offers no new insight, and it does so with a stillborn plot. The film has little visual flair, except for some haunting scenes of roving bands silently moving by torchlight in the distance. Haneke's depiction of the French countryside is misty and gray, but it's not far removed from present reality. It's his way of saying that for many people in other countries (say, Somalia) his depiction of the "end of the world" is their present world, a life of poverty, rape, anarchy, and hopelessness that they must live with daily. By not explaining the origins of the apocalypse and by having the conditions thrust suddenly and awkwardly on the film's central characters--a mother (Isabelle Huppert) and her two children--Haneke suggests that this dystopia is not as far off as we would like to imagine. Beyond this, he offers no clear message about what we must avoid in order to avoid destruction. We must imagine for ourselves what must be undone in order to change our fate (stop polluting? stop warring? end class inequality? end ethnic racism?), but why do we need to imagine this when there exist ample films that imagine these things for us? Since the writers of the Hebrew Bible wrote grizzly prophetic visions like those in Isaiah and Daniel, people have been imagining the end times, how rapidly they are approaching, what might cause them, and what we must do to avoid them. Time of the Wolf offers very little to this established train of thought, instead merely depicting outcomes that are far more resonant in other films.

A man who has had almost no prior screen time is randomly murdered, and when his killer is later accused before a crowd he escapes penalty since the crowd is incapable of justice without evidence and structure. A young girl is raped and then she is either murdered or she commits suicide; the rapist is never revealed or punished. People commit robberies that others are accused of, and stress and prejudice become controlling factors of some people's behavior. Characters are introduced and dropped, none of them ever reaching two or more dimensions. It's all very realistic, but ultimately drab and tedious.

Out of everything, few moments are memorable:

When a woman (Luminita Gheorghiu) asks another (Huppert) for a cigarette, she readily offers a tin of food in exchange. Later, out of some remnant of politeness, she offers the woman a puff of the bartered cigarette, then stares longingly as a lost-in-thought Huppert lets the cigarette turn to ash. Having been returned the cigarette, she smokes it to the filter, knowing that the exchange has not been fair and that she may never again have another cigarette.

A father's burial is edited over, but when his son's parakeet dies, the mourning ritual is highlighted, perhaps illustrating the child's attempt to confront the larger, more difficult issue by treating the smaller issue with excessive care.

And in the film's climax, that same son builds a fire and prepares to thrust himself into it as a sacrificial lamb. Having overheard a description of such a religious ritual from an old man who swore by its religious effectiveness, the boy attempts to solve the world's problems. The scene is an instant of genuine insight into child psychology, revealing the boy's inclination to believe that everything is his fault and his readiness to fix things with a superstitious gesture of no real value.

Yet despite these brief moments, the film is a pretentious bore, uninspiring, selfish, and forgettable.

Time of the Wolf (2003)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Isabelle Huppert, Luminita Gheorghiu, Anaïs Demoustier)
4/10

Movie Review: The Piano Teacher (2001)

Austrian director Michael Haneke once said, "[My films] are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus." Certainly, nothing comes easy in a Haneke film. Exposition is rarely offered, and things usually taken for granted such as division between "good" characters and "bad" are here denied. In place of honest monologues and meaningfully edited action, Haneke substitutes silence, well-placed, drawn-out moments of silence during intervals where conventional filmmakers would offer answers. The placement and duration of these pauses is sufficient to require an involved viewer to begin deciding what questions he or she needs resolved and, in the process, to begin trying to solve them. Whereas the concise speed of conventional films offers no opportunities for pondering until after the end credits have begun to roll, Haneke's films are equal parts puzzling presentation and ponderous pausing. While perhaps tedious to some, the movies of Michael Haneke effectively cement themselves in the minds of their viewers.

The titular character of La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher or The Piano Player) is Erika Kohut, a woman of uncertain quality. Played by Isabelle Huppert with no cosmetic frills, she is a grim, pale, stony woman, her hair, clothing, and face tightly constrictive. In the movie's opening scene, she is presented sympathetically as a late middle aged, depressed adult still living under the domineering presence of a manipulative, aggressive mother (Annie Girardot). In subsequent scenes, however, the film presents a thoroughly cold and unlikable side of her as she completes a day of work as a piano instructor at a Viennese conservatory. Grilling her teenage students, she is unyielding, negative, and demanding, insulting her pupils for failing to grasp what she, as a skilled, lifelong pianist, has come to appreciate.

Erika's mother, in her typical way of seeding virulent ideas in seemingly offhand, tangential remarks, suggests one reason for Erika's frigid approach toward her students: jealousy of competition. Suggesting that Erika should prevent her insecure student Anna Schober from becoming too competent in Schubert lest she step on Erika's toes as the modern master of the composer's complex works, the mother reveals that Erika's ultimate desire is not to teach but to do. Despite her accomplishments as a specialist of Schubert, Erika has never succeeded as a concert pianist. Her career as a teacher is a backup plan, a second choice, and it puts her in the awkward position of wanting to teach her students well, but not wanting to teach them well enough that they might prevent her from achieving her ultimate dream.

This frustrating fantasy--that despite her age she might still one day succeed as a professional musician--continually fueled by her mother's insistence, drives Erika to commit a diabolical act. Frustrated by Anna's growing success days before a school recital that, according to the mother, just may have important people in the audience, Erika secretly slips glass shards into Anna's coat pocket. When Anna shoves her hand into them, her fingers--and her possible career as a pianist--are destroyed. Erika does what any teacher must do; in order to allow Anna's fellow musicians the opportunity to perform in the recital, Erika fills her position as an understudy. And so the culmination of her irrational jealousy results in an awkward fulfillment of her desires: she will get to perform in front of these speculative "important people" in the audience, but she will be doing so as a fortysomething woman at a school recital with teenagers. What seems like a worthwhile fantasy is sometimes a miserable reality.

And that's the theme of this disturbing film: the crucial differences between positive expectations and their realistic fulfillment. Erika is, it's assumed a virgin. Despite her stern and serious appearance, however, she possesses the sexual desire of a hormonal adolescent. After work she visits sex shops in order to watch graphic pornography in the private booths, sniffing the semen-soaked tissues from the wastebasket. At night, she prowls about drive-in movie theater lots, hoping to find couples making love in back seats of cars. Her responses to sexual arousal are natural and bodily, but wholly abnormal: sexual stimulation causes her to cough, to urinate, to vomit, and to bleed. Her orgasms are physical eruptions and releases, yet they are far removed from normal sexual responses and instead are the symptoms of illness and injury. (To be fair, however, the bleeding is not spontaneous but a direct result of her having cut her labia with a razor blade in the bathtub.)

Her sexual fantasies are likewise unconventional. When she meets Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), a young, charismatic engineering student who shares a similar skill in and passion for Schubert, Erika sees an opportunity to express her sexual self honestly. Walter is handsome, healthy, active, and masculine. An intelligent, practical, ambitious charmer, he is also perhaps the first attractive man to ever openly express an interest in Erika. She resists his desire to be a typical, dominant, male lover, however, and eventually confesses to him her real sexual needs in a lengthy handwritten letter detailing physical abuse, bondage, submission, humiliation, helplessness, and rape. She reveals a box full of ropes and tools she has collected for these purposes. She doesn't want tenderness, she wants to be brutally subjected to physical sensations. She wants to be overpowered by sexuality. She wants a tactile, unavoidable manifestation of the psychological, subversive control that her mother exerts over her everyday. Oddly, though she wants to be dominated, she details these desires in perfectly regimented instructions and rules. The constraints of wanting a specific fantasy fulfilled--in other words, needing to communicate this fantasy to another person and direct that person like an actor--are at odds with the submissive, spontaneous, uncontrollable nature of the fantasy. Whereas an unspoken aspect of any fantasy is that it plays itself out naturally without being discussed and artificially created beforehand, the specific, unusual desires of her fantasy, cultivated over several decades, could never possibly happen without some prior rendering of the fantasy as rehearsed playacting.

Furthermore, Walter is disgusted. He doesn't want to be told what to do. He prefers his sex life to be unscripted and unregulated. He also is into traditional lovemaking, not loud, violent rape. He rejects her. She relents and persists, realizing that her honesty may have been to abrupt and startling and offering him an opportunity to do whatever he wants to do with her. Having bared her soul to someone, she doesn't want to lose perhaps her last opportunity for a sexual, mutual relationship. He, however, having learned more secrets about her than most people ever learn about another, cannot shake the reminders of what he deems disgusting and inhuman. Though she assures him that the specific circumstances of anyone's desires for love and sex are ultimately "banal" trivialities, his new knowledge that she is a sexual, biological, desperate creature presents an unconquerable challenge to his fantasy of her as a talented, controlled, sensible mentor. How can he respect her when she's titillated by being disrespected? And why would he want to have sex with anyone he doesn't respect?

A mark of happiness and a guarantee of success is an ability to convince ourselves that our fantasies and reality bear any resemblance. The Piano Teacher is a tragedy for Erika because it reveals her inability to form realistic, achievable fantasies and her recognition that when these fantasies come as close to being true as possible, they are never as good as she imagined they might be. The climax of The Piano Teacher is a disturbing and enigmatic depiction of this unfortunate fact. Though Erika convincingly informs Walter that she has no feelings, this is a lie, a mere fantasy that she wishes were true about herself. Though she keeps her emotions bound up and hidden, they are unleashed when she reveals her desires to Walter. The secret box under her bed that holds her sexual torture devices may as well be a Pandora's Box, for its opening chisels at her rigid exterior and reveals a frantic flurry of emotions beneath. She is desperate to be touched, to be loved, to be recognized, to be appreciated. In the bed that she shares with her mother, she frantically kisses, hugs, and touches her in a moment of strange incest that results in the mother beating her back and screaming at her. She pursues Walter, apologizes, berates herself, and offers him whatever he wants, but during an act of relatively normal sex, she orgasmically vomits. Misinterpreting her bodily reaction to his penis as the ultimate rejection of his manhood, he offers her insults and disgust. Finally, on the same night that her insane father dies in an asylum, a confused Walter forces his way into her apartment and offers her everything she wants.

Angry, frustrated, and confused, Walter accuses Erika of being a pervert. His frustration is genuine, but it also seems forcibly mustered, as though he's trying to play the role of an angry man. When he suddenly slaps her, he asks, "Not as you imagined, huh?" When her mother enters and tries to phone the police, he reacts instinctively and aggressively, throwing her in the bedroom, locking her up, and telling her off in a way that Erika must have wanted to do for decades. "'Forget your mother.' We have time. We have all night," he says. Then he pauses, closing his eyes and thinking. "Let's pick up where we left off," he says pointing to the place by the door where he slapped her. It's as though he's rehearsing, attempting to build a believable character while dealing with bad lines, forgotten actions, and interruptions. "Is this really what you imagined?" he pleads with her, and she shakes her head for an ambiguous reason--does she no longer want it or does she want it differently? She seems flustered and disappointed, and at one point it almost looks as though she rolls her eyes. It's not her job to direct him once the fantasy begins; he should be a better actor. Quoting her erotic confession, he hits her about the face. He beats and kicks her. She bleeds. She gives him a solid command to avoid hitting in the face and hands. But when she tells him to please stop, the request comes from a different voice. In her letter it predicted that she would say no and insisted that if she did say no, it meant that he should only be more aggressive. He is, but then he stops himself. He's not having fun, she doesn't appear to be having fun, and he's not even certain he's doing anything right.

He excuses himself to the kitchen to collect himself and drink a glass of water. Perhaps he takes off the costume at this point; perhaps he wishes to end the play. When he brings her back a glass of water, he sees her attempting to unlock her mother. Not part of the script, he reacts suddenly, smashing the glass and hitting her. Why is she trying to get him in trouble? Is she merely improvising, or is she actually trying to avoid his rape? When he responds violently, is it merely to protect his criminal self, or is he just trying to stick to the script? Is he raping her or not? Explaining that he's not enjoying the script and that it's time for him to play by his own rules, he rolls on top of her and begins to have sex with her in a tender, conventional, missionary position. He kisses her face, eyes, and mouth, though she doesn't kiss back. Her face is expressionless. She tells him to stop, but he keeps going. Finally, responding to her cold behavior, he deviates fully from the script, asking "Are you trying to tell me I should go?" She says nothing. He orgasms and then selfishly leaves.

They don't call the police. Maybe calling the police, given the evidence of the letter, would be ineffectual. Maybe they don't call the police because he didn't truly commit a crime. Maybe they're just scared. The next day, at the recital, Erika seems rather composed despite her bruised face. She brings a kitchen knife in her purse, and when Walter treats her as though nothing positive or negative had ever happened between them, she thrusts the knife into her own chest and exits the building into the night. Maybe she planned to kill him. Maybe she always planned to kill herself. The film closes without answering this question.

But it also leaves a host of other questions unresolved. The climactic sex act was undeniably a "rape," but was it nonconsensual, and if it was, then was it nonconsensual from the beginning or only at the point when Walter deviated from the script? Is there such a thing as consensual rape? Was it inevitable that Walter would leave Erika after conquering her sexually, and are the specifics of the sex thus irrelevant in regard to the fact that Walter was a teenage boy only after sex whereas Erika was after a deeper relationship? Does Erika kill herself because Walter rapes her, or does she kill herself because he leaves her and moves on? Or does she kill herself because she can no longer deal with having her emotions and desires exposed? Or does she kill herself out of embarrassment? Or does she kill herself because she realizes that what she wants and needs from life will always be unattainable? Does she even kill herself, or is it merely a showy display of masochism, an attempt to feel something near her heart despite truly being able to feel anything in her heart? Is she telling the truth when she says that she has no feelings? Can any relationship based on preset, unequal roles of domination and submission truly reach a level of loving equality outside of sex? Is sex really just a banal aspect of a broader love? Is Walter's statement after the rape that "love isn't everything" what truly kills her? And what role have Erika's domineering mother and absent yet important insane father played in her psychological development?

The Piano Teacher, which is Haneke's only theatrical film to date that was not based on his own original story (it is based on a novel by feminist Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, who later won the Nobel Prize in 2004), is the perfect representative of his "cinema of insistent questions." Anyone who watches the film must decide for him or herself what its intentions are. Having called it a perfect representative of a thought-provoking screenplay, however, I must admit that The Piano Teacher is not enjoyable film to watch. There are numerous scenes of what can only be described as sexual horror compounded with monstrous levels of psychological ugliness. Isabelle Huppert is uniform and convincing in her portrayal, but her character is inhuman and possibly psychotic, impossible to relate to on any emotional or personal level. While the film is fascinating and gripping, its outcome is bleak and discomforting, and whether or not a normal viewer has anything to learn from its psychology is questionable. The Piano Teacher is a remarkable film, but not a recommendable one.

The Piano Teacher (2001)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Isabelle Huppert, Benoît Magimel)
6/10

Movie Review: Code Unknown (2000)

There were some parts of Code Unknown (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages) the specifics of which I did not understand. Some of these same parts, I think, were intentionally inaccessible. That's okay. Tonally, the film makes perfect sense. Though the title literally refers to an apartment building access code, the title more generally refers to the complex, unintelligible cipher of our emotions. Michael Haneke's film is about the emotional retardation of the present age, an era in which it has become increasingly difficult to understand our own emotions and their consequences and nearly impossible to interpret and respond to the feelings of others. Code Unknown is a complex portrait of various people unable to comprehend that they do not live in a void but within an interconnected society.

Suitably subtitled Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys, Code Unknown offers numerous snapshots of the lives of people from around the globe. At the center is an incomparable Juliette Binoche as Anne Laurent, a rising actress whose brother-in-law Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) is a sullen, rebellious teenager. Jean's aging father's dream is that Jean will inherit the family farm, a beautiful and prosperous estate, but though Jean has no dreams of his own and though he needn't continue to run the farm once his father dies, he refuses to cooperate. The father (Josef Bierbichler) bribes him with a motorbike and with soft words, and he quietly excuses himself to the bathroom so that he can cry alone in the dark while flushing the toilet. He does not want the family legacy to cease.

But Jean uses the motorbike to run away and disappear, leaving a terse note that he does not wish to be found. While walking the sidewalks of Paris on a drizzly day, he absentmindedly throws a half-eaten croissant into the lap of a homeless, older woman (Luminita Gheorghiu). Though most passers-by would probably not even notice or care about this rude treatment of a disheveled vagabond, and though the woman scarcely even responds herself--happy just to have food and not surprised at being treated with contempt--an astounded Amdaou (Ona Lu Yenke), a young man of Malian descent, pursues Jean, insisting that he apologize to the woman for his awful behavior. Jean refuses, a scuffle ensues, and the police arrive on scene. Handsome, white Jean is dismissed, black Amadou spends a night in prison, and the homeless woman is deported.

The film delves into the lives of all parties involved. We see Amadou's father, a cab driver, abandon his family to return to Mali. We see one of his fares treat him with entitled annoyance without realizing that the cab driver is a human being facing an emergency. We see Maria, the panhandler, in her native Romania, unable to tell her closest friends and family members that she was destitute in France and did not return of her own free will. We see Jean's father worriedly telling Anne and Anne's husband Georges (Jean's older brother, played by Thierry Neuvic) that Jean has disappeared. Stressed and depressed, he picks at crumbs on the tabletop with his fidgeting hands. When Anne tries to comfort him by placing her hand over his, he abruptly rises and leaves the room. Even when others do reach out to us, we do not know how to respond.

The beautiful, natural, and extremely talented Juliette Binoche is the focal point of the film, and we variously see her in all positions of the emotional divide. We also see her in the only three melodramatically, intensely emotional scenes of the film, three scenes in which she is performing as an actor: first in a thriller film, where she has just found out that she is about to be slowly murdered by a psychopath and responds (very convincingly) with confusion then desperation then tears, second in a stage comedy in which she laughs riotously while revealing her true feelings about a rival, and finally in a romantic drama in which she reacts with fear, tears, and love when her fictional son nearly falls off a twenty-fourth floor balcony. These scenes illustrate what we typically see in art and what we often expect from our own lives and relationships--passion, honesty, argument. The scenes in which Anne is not acting illustrate what we more often get in reality, such as the aforementioned scene where Anne tries to console her father-in-law but is cut off.

In another scene, a neighbor turns to her via an anonymous note for help in protecting a violently abused child. Earlier we witnessed the abuse second-hand. Anne is ironing while watching the television and hears agonized screaming in the distance. She mutes the television, worries over the screaming, but continues ironing. The screaming stops, some moments of silence pass, and Anne turns the volume on the television back up. She continues ironing. When she receives the note, she deliberates with Georges over how to respond to the worrisome note. This conversation turns into an argument; Georges doesn't want to think about the problem since the note wasn't addressed to him, and Anne accuses him of being heartless. In the end, Anne does nothing about the troubling situation, and the child is killed. Anne attends the funeral.

In the film's climax (though to call it a climax implies that the film has a plot, and Code Unknown really doesn't have a narrative-driven structure... when I say climax, I mean the most emotionally powerful scene, which is almost at the end of the film and which is also the last scene with audible dialogue), we see Anne in need of help herself. On the train, she is accosted by a suave Arab teenager (Walid Afkir), who presumes that she is a wealthy, racist, and arrogant bitch and then simultaneously flirts with and verbally assaults her while a friend stands nearby, laughing at the bully's antics. There are several other people on the train, but except for an old woman who disapprovingly looks at the boy and then turns away, nobody says or does anything. Anne remains silent, ignoring the boy as he belittles her, not wanting to acknowledge his rudeness with a response. She rises and walks to another seat, but he follows her. She continues to ignore him as best she can, and finally he sits beside her, silent, normal. The train comes to a stop, the doors open, and he spits on her face at close range. As he bolts out the door, an older Arab man (Maurice Bénichou) trips him. The boy responds with anger, calling the gentleman a fool. The gentleman calmly--though with obvious nervousness--removes his eyeglasses, wordlessly hands them to Anne across the aisle, and rises for a fight, yelling at the boy in Arabic. The boy backs down. The man sits back down and continues staring forward, as before, as though nothing has happened. Anne hands him back his glasses, then wipes her face. The train continues moving, with the boy off-camera, and all is silent. The train comes to another stop, and the boy exits with a loud and frightening threat directed toward the man. Crisis averted, Anne breaks into tears. All she can manage to say is a sob-choked "Merci" to the man who stood up for her, but he does not respond, does not know how to respond, just continues staring forward as people do on a subway.

This genuine and emotionally resonant scene is filmed in one long cut with the camera acting as an inactive eye witness. The point-of-view is that of someone riding the train but refusing to act, just as all of the other passengers witness Anne's dilemma but pretend to remain ignorant. The boy is just a boy and it doesn't take much to put an end to his hatred, yet no one is willing to offer the slightest assistance. They all pass the buck to fate or to more noble heroes. Would we do anything if in the same situation? How much injustice do we see daily that we pretend does not exist? How often do we convince ourselves that we are not the hero-type, that some crises are better left resolved by others? When the gentleman stands up for her, he seemingly does so before he even realizes that he has resolved to do it. Afterward, he remains speechless and uncomprehending, still unable to talk to or even look at the woman he has just saved, unable to share words at a time when words would mean so much.

Code Unknown speaks volumes about the war-torn landscape of our emotions; this review has only scratched the surface, without examining Georges's career as a wartime photographer of atrocities, Amadou's acceptance-seeking white girlfriend, Amadou's superstitious mother, or the deaf children who bookend the film with a guessing game of charades in which they act out complex, enigmatic feelings. One of Michael Haneke's best films, Code Unknown is a rich movie that perfectly captures our current crisis of disconnect.

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Juliette Binoche, Luminita Gheorghiu, Ona Lu Yenke, Thierry Neuvic, Maurice Bénichou)
9/10

Movie Review: Funny Games (1997)

Sometimes a great movie is ruined by its message--not because it's an offensive message, but because it's an obvious, an unnecessary, or a heavy-handed one. And at times like those, the viewer begins to suspect that he is being insulted or condescended to by the filmmaker. While Michael Haneke's direction of tension and editing of suspense is top-notch in Funny Games, his philosophical intent is obtuse and obnoxious.

Funny Games is a study of theodicy, a story of inexplicable evil and gratuitous violence. An upper middle class family, vacationing at their sunny, charming lake house for a weekend, is visited by two polite but aggressive young men, who hold the family hostage and unleash unchecked physical and emotional violence upon them throughout the night. That's what Funny Games is about on the surface, but the film is really about itself, an examination of its genre, an eye trained on violent entertainment that demands viewer involvement in the disturbing crime. Not merely a thriller to be consumed, Funny Games attempts to deliver consequences to the viewer, to ask him what possible enjoyment he expected from watching unbridled misery?

The typical thriller film relies on a number of conventions. First, we must be able to see the contest between the good guy(s) and the bad guy(s) as indicative of some greater moral or philosophical struggle. While they needn't be one-dimensional, the good guy(s) must represent some virtue (masculinity, justice, faith) while the bad guy(s) must possess some vice. This vice usually is revealed in some back story, serving as the instigator of the bad guy's turn to crime. Drug abuse, jealousy, greed, insecurity--it's often not anything believable. In Funny Games, the maniacal Peter and Paul have no back story, though they jokingly offer a number of stereotypical reasons for their fall from grace--heroin addiction, envy, abusive childhoods. Life is a continuous chain of countless causes and events, many of them minute, some of them irrational, millions of them undetectable; in reality our motivations are not so easily traced as in the movies. Our lives do not so easily fall into philosophical dichotomies and moral juxtapositions.

Furthermore, if Paul and Peter, the ambiguous villains of the film, have no discernible cause for their evil, then what virtues do Anna, Georg, and their young son Schorschi represent? Economic security? Lesiure? Minding their own business? Being courteous, but only to a point? They're a traditional, happy family unit, but they're hardly virtuous for being so. There's nothing vile about them, but neither is there anything emphatically great about them that forces us to root for their survival.

Which brings me to another convention, an obvious one that was actually codified in the Motion Picture Production Code from 1930 to 1968: the good guys always win. Purity, even if flawed, always triumphs, and crime never pays. As a correlative, children--who are always pure except in cases of temporary satanic possession--are always to survive. A good guy or two might fall in the process, but at least one hero always remains standing.

Well, Haneke doesn't bother with this expectation. The good guys don't always win in reality, and whether they do or not, it more often is a result of chance than of storytelling justice. Even the most common of cinematic conventions Haneke subverts. A major plot occurrence, the first murder, suddenly happens off-screen while the camera follows Paul into the kitchen to make a sandwich. Paul frequently winks at the camera and speaks to the audience, inviting them to participate in the game and take wagers on what the film's outcome will be--something that all viewers do subconsciously while watching any film, but without ever being accused of it. When Anna begs the sociopaths to kill them quickly and get it over with, Paul complains of the loss of entertainment value and the fact that they have not yet reached feature film length. (In other words, we need to give these sadistic viewers what they paid for.) Following the first murder, the film ceases to speak in "film language"--cuts, close-up, music, action--and instead depicts a realistic portrayal of the aftermath of horror: a mostly silent, static, ten minute long-distance shot of the two exhausted, speechless survivors too battered and stupefied to comprehend their misery while the bloody corpse lies in the corner of the frame. A typical thriller rarely pauses, and never for this long. As a result, the typical thriller never gives the viewer much time to think, never allows the viewer a chance to allow the reality of violence to sink in. In this ten minute, utterly disturbing sequence, the viewer is forced to reflect on the violence he has willingly volunteered and paid to see, to wonder what enjoyment he expected.

Arno Frisch invites us to join in on the fun.

But the most startling break from convention is during the climax, when Anna seizes an opportunity to kill her captors. After shooting and killing Peter, Paul coldcocks her, hunts for the remote control, and rewinds the film. When the opportunity arises again, Paul intercepts her and maintains the upper hand. This may outrage many viewers. That's breaking the rules! You can't do that in reality! He's not allowed to have so much control! But, of course, this isn't reality, there needn't be the same rules, and all control has lied in Michael Haneke's hands throughout the film.

I needn't say that this is an unpleasant film. Haneke has tried his hardest to make it so, and he has succeeded rather marvelously, stripping every ounce of entertainment and hope from this movie. A skillful director, he ratchets up the tension between the opposing parties in their struggle for power. From the film's opening credits--when a beautiful aria is cut off by screaming spazzcore as the film's English title slams onto the screen--he threads the movie with discomforting hints that something is wrong. An awkward conversation with neighbors, an unnecessary pair of gloves, a suspicious and almost insulting clumsiness, the far-off squeal of a dog, a rude imposition phrased in the politest of terms--Haneke knows how to shove needles into the viewer's spine. The acting perfectly suits the film's intent. Arno Frisch, who plays Paul, has dark, vacant eyes and a nihilistic contempt, yet he projects a handsome, charming exuberance; we almost like him, despite how horrible he is. Susanne Lothar as Anna is likable enough and pretty enough, yet she's also a bit cold and snobbish; we almost don't like her. And Ulrich Mühe as Georg is the antithesis of our desired action hero: inactive, crippled, indecisive, and ineffective--yet, for all of that, never unlikable. Would we, after taking an unexpected blow to the knee with a golf club, be any more courageous than him? The film is certainly well made.

Yet by the time it was over, I found myself wondering why Haneke had bothered with such a ham-fisted expose. If he thinks that violent entertainment is a recent phenomenon, then he's mistaken. Violence has been relished in art and literature since the dawn of history. The supposition that violent entertainment begets violent actions and thoughts in reality is unprovable but, in my opinion, false. Sleep experts theorize that the wackiness, horror, and violence of our REM dreams is to prepare us to encounter and survive any such obstacles we may come across in our waking lives. Horror movies, thrillers, and action flicks, I think, sometimes serve a similar purpose, forcing us to think about the most unexpected of occurrences so that if we come across them in our lives we won't be like deer in headlights, too surprised to react. If Haneke thinks that violence is so inexplicable and unwarranted, striking random people whether they deserve it or not, then maybe it's not a bad idea to be prepared.

Anyway, it's hard to side with a filmmaker who wants his viewers to suffer simply for wanting to enjoy his film.

Funny Games (1997)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Arno Frisch, Susanna Lothar, Ulrich Mühe)
7/10

Movie Review: 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)

Given how interesting The Seventh Continent and Benny's Video were, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, the final film in Michael Haneke's "Glaciation Trilogy" about the frigidity of modern society, is a huge disappointment. I suppose someone could surmise that from the awful title, which accurately sums up the content of the film: seventy-one brief scenes (including television news clips) leading chronologically to a random act of violence.

The seventy-one scenes, excluding the news clips (which detail ethnic violence, foreign invasions, ethnic clashes, IRA bombings, genocidal war, and child abuse), relate six exposition-free stories about a handful of characters we know nearly nothing about. These are the stories, in no particular order:

-A young army cadet robs the base armory and sells the weapons and ammunition to the black market, only to have his barracks ransacked by martial detective.

-A young boy who has escaped drugs, prostitution, and poverty in Romania illegally hitchhikes to Austria because a girlfriend informs him that people are nice to children there. He instead encounters (with a few exceptions) apathy and hostility as he loiters and pandhandles at a train station, committing small crimes to sustain himself. He eventually turns himself in to the police, hoping to find warmth and refugee status there.

-A married couple that desperately wants a child adopts a foster daughter who is emotionally hardened, fearful, and untrusting. They try to elicit warmth from her, but quickly give up and return her to the agency when they hear the story of the Romanian boy on the local news. They adopt him in her place.

-An armored truck driver who makes bank deliveries grieves over the failing health of his baby daughter. He prays fervently for her recovery, for world peace, for continued safety, and for the end of various other sufferings, yet his marriage and his child's health gradually deteriorate.

-An unhappy bank teller estranges her family from her elderly father, a man of poor health whose lonely life consists of watching television, talking on the phone to the daughter who is uninterested in him, and making monthly trips to the bank in order to withdraw his pensions and see her.

-An impulsive, passive college student whose only passtime is ping pong, though he's not particularly good at it, obtains--through a random chain of events--a gun from his roommate. This was one of the guns stolen by the army cadet. One afternoon before Christmas, he goes to a gas station to fill up his tank before picking up a friend, but he forgets his cash. Hassled by the driver behind him, treated brusquely by the gas station attendant, frustrated by a broken ATM, humiliated by a man in the long line inside the bank, and impatient to pick up his friend on time, he snaps, pulls the gun, shoots up the bank, and commits suicide in his car. Though details are not specified, it is implied that he has randomly killed the elderly father, the foster mother, and the armored truck driver.

The news treats the shooting spree as a random act of inexplicable violence, but the recurring news clips throughout the film, all of which show a steady stream of violence and horror, suggest that the media has created a culture in which people have accepted violence as a regular solution to problems, the only way to be heard in a society that isn't interested in hearing about anyone's minor problems. The details of the film's multiple stories help cement this idea. The bank teller doesn't care to hear about her father's failing health, and she only asks him how he's doing when he shows up at her work because it is instinctive for her to ask this to customers. When he actually answers her, she is annoyed and explains that she doesn't have time to be bothered. The foster family adopts a psychologically damaged girl, but is too impatient to actually help her; she isn't able to quickly fill the spot they've made for her in the way they want it filled, so they easily replace her with another candidate. The armored truck driver prays devoutly to God, but the prayers fail to cure his daughter or save his life. When he quietly and unexpectedly tells his wife that he loves her during dinner, she responds with suspicion and confusion until he slaps her. The only moment of genuine connection in the film is at the train station, when the Romanian boy pretends to be in a swimming pool with another young boy across the tracks. Perhaps these two boys are still too young too have learned apathy and disregard.

The only heartfelt minute out of one hundred.

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance is a film about emotional frigidity, but the film itself is too cold and impenetrable to be enjoyable. Besides the scene with the two boys at the train station (and another brief moment when the Romanian boy makes friends with an immigrant Polish newsman despite the language barrier), the film is heartless and mechanical. (In one scene, for instance, the future murderer practices ping pong by himself for five or more minutes of uncut screen time. Maybe that's supposed to show us how lonely his life is? But shouldn't any athlete practice his sport? What's really so bad about that?) The Seventh Continent and Benny's Video were disturbing and dreary, but by showing the very worst of lives, those films encouraged us to choose different, happier lives. 71 Fragments is bleak for bleakness's sake, insisting that violence is a part of our world and that meaningless suffering eventually comes for all of us, whatever we do. Someone tell me where the shred of hope is in that because I'm at a loss to find it.

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Gabriel Cosmin Urdes, Lukas Miko, Udo Samel)
4/10

Movie Review: Benny's Video (1992)

Michael Haneke's second feature film is also the second in his so-called "Glaciation Trilogy," a trio of pictures about the emotional coldness and psychological impenetrability of modern society that began with 1989's barren, antarctic Der Siebente Kontinent. (Calling his first three films a "glaciation trilogy" implies that the rest of Haneke's films don't disturbingly delve into much the same themes, which is an obvious misstatement.)

Benny's Video begins with footage shot on a hand-held personal video camcorder. Farmers straddle a disoriented pig, hold a captive bolt pistol to his forehead, and slaughter the squealing, startled animal in close-up. (Those who have seen No Country for Old Men will recognize the extermination device.) The video pauses, rewinds, and replays in slow motion, savoring the zoomed-in final moments of the pig's life. They say animals differ from humans in that they have no foreknowledge of their mortality, that they are simpler and blissfully ignorant because they do not bear the burden of knowing death. But in slow motion, one sees a horrifying realization flooding the pig's eyes as the bolt enters his brain. This look of awful epiphany could just be a spontaneous reaction to the physical stimulus, but in slow motion and in close-up, in repeated viewings, it's easy for us to project our own feelings of doom, meaninglessness, and vanity on the pig's last panicked expression.

In Richard Linklater's meanderingly philosophical comedy Slacker, released one year earlier in 1991, a social experimenter/cultist obsessed with television images recounts a story of having seen--in person--an angry drunk stumble out of a bar and land on his own knife, an event that means almost nothing to him because he saw it in the chaotic, unpredictable, and vast reality and not within the confines of a structured, symbol-driven, propagandistic television screen. He can't rewind to examine the details. He doesn't know the whole plot, what happened before and what followed after, so there's no context. Maybe he was a bad guy and the death was satisfying or funny. Maybe the death was the result of some cruel, fateful twist of dramatic irony. Maybe he didn't even die--the spectator, after all, didn't even get a close-up of the knife entering the body, didn't get to immediately cut with a sound bridge of ambulance sirens to the emergency room. Even the blood, the real blood, didn't look like the blood he was used to seeing in movies, the blood that carried so much meaning and connotation in his mind. The hue was wrong, and he couldn't adjust the hue.

There's no knowing how many times Benny, the fifteen-year-old cameraman who filmed the pig's death, has watched the snuff film. There's no telling what the video may mean to him, if it means anything at all. Benny doesn't talk very much, nor does his family especially value communication. A typical family gathering involves them seated around the home entertainment system, impassively watching the last grisly news footage from the Bosnian war while muttering the occasional bit of half-hearted chatter. Haneke's lens cleverly remains glued to the television screen during these scenes; just as they'd rather watch the tube than each other, so must we.

Benny also doesn't spend much time in thoughtful meditation or quiet introspection. His life has been arranged so that he constantly has several layers of distraction competing for his attention, a thick protective blanket of white noise to shield him from any troublesome thoughts. While doing homework he blasts loud punk music and watches television. Before drifting off to bed he doesn't stare at the ceiling or at the inside of his eyelids, reliving the day and trying to make sense of it; he watches the latest Hollywood action and horror films, checked out three at a time from the local rental store.

His parents facilitate this thoughtless, high-tech lifestyle, buying him the gadgetry he desires and not caring that his bedroom is a sealed-off, inorganic crypt with a television screen substituting an open window. Benny has trained a camcorder to stare out his window and down to the faceless traffic on the street. Maybe that helps him to attach some narrative meaning to an otherwise meaningless world. Maybe it helps him imagine that some director, screenwriter, or editor is in control of the chaos outside his door.

There's no context for much of the imagery Benny is exposed to, no emotional intelligence or mental maturity to support what he's seen in his young life. Nobody's told him much about death or life, love or hate, rape and murder, responsibility and disappointment, dependability and despair. He knows these things exist, but they all exist in distorted measurements alongside aliens, car chases, mutants, and talking rabbits, and he perhaps understands as much about all of these as he would understand watching a film in a language he's never been taught. One need only look to his older sister for proof; her presence in the film is brief, and we know simply that she is a successful pyramid schemer who lies to her parents to use their apartment as a party headquarters for her scam. When confronted with the truth, her father scolds her only for not letting him know sooner so that he could properly execute the party by hiring a caterer. Maybe she'll be in prison in a year, but nobody in the family seems capable of conceiving this or understanding why.

A typical Haneke shot: people close together physically yet miles apart mentally.

When Benny murders a young girl using the captive bolt pistol he has pilfered from the farm, he genuinely seems not to possess any motive or understanding as to why he has committed the horrible crime. It is a random act of senseless violence, like changing the channel from a boring teen drama to a serial killer thriller. Benny meets the girl at the video store. She also seems neglected and alienated, and she willingly follows him to his apartment for microwave pizza and strange conversation. Benny is oddly dysfunctional throughout their encounter--charming and polite yet also impulsive. When he tackles her while acting out an unfunny joke about cops on the Metro, we realize his complete lack of social decorum, heightened only by his decision to show her (and to re-show her in slow-mo instant replay) his slaughterhouse video. She's just as intrigued and perplexed. What is death all about? He tells her about dead bodies in movies ("ketchup and plastic") and about the dead body of his grandmother, the sight of which he was shielded from at her funeral several years ago. He can see the explosive murder of millions on television, but his parents have prevented him from coming to terms with the sight of the deceased woman he once knew and love.

That's when he pulls out the pistol and dares her to shoot him. She refuses and dares him. He refuses. She calls him a coward, and so he shoots. Not once, not twice, but three times. Until her screaming and struggling comes to an abrupt end. Haneke films this scene not in close-up nor with any intensified continuity or emotional editing; we see through the lens of his camcorder, off-center and static. The camera captures all. And where a Hollywood scene would end, or where an intense score would be cued, or where a horrified close-up would occur, life instead just keeps going on. He tries to clean up the mess, but as a fifteen-year-old would and not in any calculated, cinematic way. He listens to music and does his homework. He strips off his clothes, not so that he can be sexual with the body--other bodies don't much concern him, despite his age--but so that he can keep the blood from staining them. He gets blood on his bare torso instead, and it is while filming his blood-stained skin and then watching the video tape that he gets oddly erotic--the image charged with pornographic autoeroticism even though the actual event was sexless. He takes a phone call from his friend. He goes to a concert. He gets a haircut and takes in a movie. He goes to school.

He has effectively changed the channel. The murder is behind him, and he's moved on to different scenes, different episodes, different genres.

Except he hasn't. The body's still stuffed in his closet, and the memory's still buried somewhere in his mind. Plus, most importantly, he still has the videotape.

Arno Frisch handles the role of Benny masterfully--a handsome and superficial exterior with a touch of radiant menace, offering glimpses into an interior that's largely vacant but not entirely so. And it's that occasional, subtle glimpse of a tiny human interior, bursting to breathe and break free, that makes this film a masterpiece. As when Benny nearly confesses to his friend but instead says nothing, or when he shaves off his beautiful locks in an act of nazirite penance, starting anew with a damaged and frail look to match his inner turmoil.

Eventually he decides that the only way to confess is to speak in the only language he understands. With no preamble he plays the videotape to his shocked and silent parents, who immediately switch into film noir mode with talk of alibis, witnesses, and the graphic, meticulous details of body disposal. Their response, so logical, clear-headed, and well-planned, can only have come from having seen so many perfect murders on television and in the movies. For the first time in their lives, they are movie stars, and the event merits an actual conversation rather than listless mumblings.

After establishing that there were no witnesses, they decide to protect their child, not merely because he's their son but also to avoid truthful accusations of child neglect that might be lodged against them. The father plans to discard the body by chopping it into tiny pieces, flushing it into the sewage system, and burning the bones, clothing, and belongings. Benny and his mother, meanwhile, will vacation in Egypt under the guise of attending a wealthy aunt's funeral. And when they are reunited one week later, everything will be back to normal, the murder will be forgotten, and Benny's brief life of crime will never be mentioned again. The tape will be rewound, ejected, and returned to the shelf.

Except Benny is tired of living life as though channel surfing. Benny wants to understand the most important and horrifying thing that's ever happened in his life. He wants to learn what contrition, sacrifice, and punishment are. Benny doesn't want to erase the tape of his memory, not least of all because a mind cannot simply be recorded over. Some remnant of the murder would stay in his subconscious forever, inexplicable, surreal, unaccounted for, resurfacing in untold ways. By protecting him from discovery and punishment, they want to deny him any chance of remorse and redemption. They want to permanently deny him the opportunity to make sense of his life, his mind, and his lethal mistake. They want to prolong his attention deficit and his emotional disconnect. They want to murder his barely living humanity.

They send him to Egypt, birthplace of Moses, of countless gods, and of ancient civilizations, and he spends the eye-opening experience behind his camcorder, trying to make sense of ancient tombs, of parasailers, of vivid sunsets and holy wars from a detached point-of-view. When his mother tries to capture him in the frame, he is sullen and scared. He doesn't want to be a part of this confusing and disordered story. The vacation is one that would change the lives of many people, but Benny only remarks on the heat and his sunburn. Will Benny always be schizoid and antisocial? Will he ever come face to face with beauty and truth?

When he returns to his videos, his entertainment system, and his corpse-less bedroom, he pointedly refuses to tell his father he loves him even as his father insists on saying that Benny is loved by him. Love is not a frightened and selfish attempt to rob a child of moral responsibility by shielding him from consequences. Love is not insuring that an unknown girl remains eternally forgotten. This may be the first thing Benny ever figures out for himself, even if he can't put it into words.

He goes to the police. He shows them incriminating evidence of his parents discussing the disposal of the body. He explains that even though he could have gotten away with it, he felt the need to go to the police, even if he's not sure why. And so he consciously, actively takes the first step in making sense of a senseless act.

Benny's Video, titled in English despite being an Austrian film (a subtle suggestion of how alien pop culture can be), is a phenomenal film, intriguingly acted by Arno Frisch, smartly filmed by cinematographer Christian Berger, and disturbingly written by Michael Haneke. Critiquing and exposing videotape and television culture was an overplayed genre in the late '80s and early '90s. Benny's Video is certainly the best of these films that I have seen, but recall also the Slacker scene, the surreal Videodrome, the bizarre Stay Tuned, the supernatural Ringu, the ghoulish Poltergeist, Stephen King's "The Tommyknockers," and several episodes of "The X Files" and other science fiction/horror anthologies, just to name a few, all of which implied the demonic horror that was lurking somewhere between the screen and the cathode ray. Some of these tales seem quaint and moralistic now, but it's surprising that an equal number of cautionary tales aren't being made about the present age. The Internet, cell phones, satellites, and the instantaneous, easy-access nature of the digital age have changed our expectations and the way our minds work, making us less patient, less focused, less appreciative, and less able to remember specifics from the constant blur of noise and details that bombards us from every direction at all hours of the day. Are today's filmmakers less technophobic? Have we all been indoctrinated by the hegemony of Google?

Where are the horror fantasies about the Internet?

Benny's Video (1992)
d: Michael Haneke w: Michael Haneke
(Arno Frisch, Angela Winkler, Ulrich Muhe)
10/10

Movie Review: The Seventh Continent (1989) (Or: "Days of the Living Dead," a Michael Haneke Nightmare)

Without knowing it at the time, we spend the first sequence of Michael Haneke's Der Sebiente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent) in the eyes of Eva, a five-year-old girl who is the daughter of the two main characters, Anna and Georg. From the backseat of the family car,Eva watches the backs of her parents' motionless, silent heads as they ride the car through a mechanical car wash. A part of their routine, the complex innerworkings of the car wash, which regularly cleanses the dirt of the outside world off their little shell, no longer elicit any wonder, interest, or conversation. Indeed, little else does either. They remain silent, staring forward, passing through life from one spiritless routine to the next.

The inhuman, disinterested clockwork of the first segment follows through the first ten minutes of the film, with no human faces entering focus in the frame and scarcely a word of conversation. From an alarm clock radio comes a disembodied voice as from the bed march two voiceless bodies, the camera frame decapitating them as intense close-ups linger on their various rituals--washing up, tying shoes, preparing store-bought coffee with an electrical coffee pot, mindless motions of muscle memory. The car leaves the garage through the mechanical door and glare from the sun across the windshield blinds us from seeing into the family's mobile cocoon. Out in the world, Eva goes to school, Georg to work, and Anna to the grocery store. Pedestrians bustle in the distance, hurrying across the frame, their faces blurred. Georg hurries across his workplace and the grinding machinery across the factory floor is far more noticeable than any of the workers' faces. At the grocery store, we gaze at the pristine, identical manufactured goods filling the shelves and not any of the shoppers.

Throughout everything we hear the cold voiceover of Anna reading a letter she has written to Georg's mother--a letter filled with trivialities and empty words in which she describes the recent death of her own mother in terms of the stress that the unexpected event has burdened their otherwise structured lives with: planning a funeral, dividing up belongings, navigating the minutiae of inheritance law. She appends a post-script: Georg sends his love and is awfully sorry about not writing himself, but his life is much too busy.

Georg's main preoccupation is to advance his career, a drive that overworks him to prove his mettle for an advancement that can only come with the removal of his superior, an older man with failing health.

Ten minutes of normal people living their modern, successful lives pass, a long duration in film time, and not one face--the seat of emotion, the usual indicator of character, the most distinguishable and unique attribute of most people--is captured by the prying camera's eye. Not one meaningful interaction is witnessed. Only grocery store aisles, shoelaces, and traffic.

The first close-up is of five-year-old Eva, who frightfully explains to her worried teacher that she can no longer see. Has she been stricken with a brain aneurysm? Is she symbolically stating that she's already seen everything in her life--the car wash, the breakfast table, the traffic--hundreds of times before? Her teacher tests her, and she fails. She really can see. But why would a five-year-old invent such a disturbing lie?

On the heels of this close-up, this moment of personal contact, the film jumps into extreme, abnormal close-ups and a rather uncomfortable moment of intimate contact as Anna, an optometrist, examines the eyes of an older woman who is one of her patients, using retinoscopes, phoropters, and mechanical prods. The eyes are the windows to the soul, and as Anna prods and distorts the woman's eyes into monstrous shapes, we hear a story from the old woman that reveals the ugly landscape of her soul. As a teenager, she and her peers humiliated her best friend for one day showing up to the school wearing glasses. Still unrepentant decades later, the woman blames her own failing eyesight on an act of karmic witchcraft perpetrated by the degraded ex-friend. In a world where intimate friendships can suddenly sour and many personal encounters result in anger and misery, it's easy to see why many may choose to avoid getting to know others, to disconnect from situations that may result in physical or psychological harm, to remain sheltered and private. Not all human interactions, Haneke shows, are beneficial and inspiring. Even Anna, who later recounts the woman's anecdote with her brother and colleague to Georg and Eva at the dinner table that night, does not gain anything meaningful from the tale of betrayal; she uses the anecdote to mock the woman, an amusing bit of workplace gossip offered up and promptly forgotten.

Why trust your bosom buddy when her own vanity and insecurity can be used as a weapon against you? Why trust anyone when you yourself are untrustworthy and self-serving? When Anna learns about her daughter's prank at school that morning, she confronts the frightened young girl, who adamantly denies having pretended blindness. Anna insists upon the truth, promising the five-year-old that no harm will come to her for confessing, but as soon as Eva admits to the untruth, Anna ferociously slaps her. Will the impressionable child, betrayed by her own mother, ever trust anyone again, or will her relationships remain no deeper and no more dangerous than fleeing encounters with a grocery store cashier, whose fingers race across the register keypad with robotic precision and whose words and thoughts are limited to price tags? Is she destined for the emotionless life of an automaton, reciting memorized prayers at fixed times, filling up the car with gas when the meter runs low, and having passionless sex at regular intervals?

Amongst this parade of sterile environments, featureless humans, and well-rehearsed rituals arise several opportunities for meaningful contact as troubled individuals, swallowed by the impersonal society around them yet still struggling to breathe, deviate from the preset parameters, throwing out their flailing arms for a life preserver, a piece of driftwood, or a stable friend to hold onto. But Anna and Georg, skilled swimmers at peace in the ocean of inhumanity, know never to enter the grasp of a drowning man, who will frantically pull you down into the abyss in his desperate clutch before you can save him. When Anna's brother's thoughts turn to their recently deceased mother during dinner--a woman who once mused that we might all be a little more peaceful if we had "a monitor instead of a head to see our thoughts"--and he begins to weep, the family, listening to rather loud American pop music from the stereo rather than talking to each other, tries to ignore him and give him time for it to pass before Anna, rather uncomfortably, rises to place her hand on him. The crying abates without any need for discussion, and the family turns to a more acceptable activity: silently watching television. Better to be fed an image, a message, and a distraction than to try to make sense of the chaos inside ourselves. Better to have a television screen than a brain.

Later at work, in a segment that takes place about one year later after Georg has assumed the position of his older superior who has fallen temporarily sick (and hence unprofitable) and been forced into retirement, Georg has an opportunity to share insights with the man he has only ever seen as an obstacle and never has a fellow human being. When the former boss comes to retrieve his belongings only to learn that they have all been boxed up and shuffled off to some unknown storage facility, he lingers over Georg, yearning to speak. Maybe he wants to warn him that one day he too will become old and less productive and his cog will be easily replaced and forgotten. Maybe he has come face to face with death and has learned something about its purpose. Maybe he wants to explain what it's like to suddenly become unnecessary, or maybe he's just lonely and unoccupied and needs a friend to laugh with for a minute or two. Whatever it is we never learn, as Georg remains stone-faced and unreceptive. The boss exits and Georg returns to more important matters--namely, staring at a computer printout of endless numbers.

Most devastating, however, is the failed opportunity for connection between Anna and Eva. When Anna discovers a sentimental piece of journalism about a girl who loses her eyesight but gains dependable companions amongst Eva's belongings, she begins to suspect what may have motivated Eva's strange prank. Eva isn't some drowning stranger, but her own daughter and progeny, so Anna cautiously approaches her, asking her if she feels lonely or unloved. Eva rather unconvincingly denies this (maybe she's still reeling from being slapped earlier in the day for telling the truth), and Anna too quickly accepts her denial. Her daughter is learning to swim.

In the segment that comes a year later (the same year that Georg rejects his boss), little has changed. Georg is still too busy to write to his own parents. The television and the radio still substitute conversation. The same routines must be carried out ad infinitum. Driving home in the rain while listening to soft rock--the closed windows and the surround sound radio sheltering them from the elements, the traffic, and the outside world--the family passes a car accident and a covered corpse. Rushing to the car wash to cleanse themselves of this close contact with impure reality, the family finally reveals a shred of the humanity and mortality they once did and still do possess. Anna breaks down in tears. Georg, who feels nothing, says nothing. Anna cries harder, turning to the backseat (unlike in the opening segment) and grasping her daughter's hand, smelling it, squeezing it, tasting it, trying to perceive and connect with warm, loving flesh in any way possible. Eva does not withdraw, and eventually even Georg enters the group hug, coldly touching Anna's face with the back of his hand--a hard and cold spot on the body where there are few nerve endings.

Another year passes and despite the breakdown things are worse than ever. At dinner, Eva quickly eats cold, colorless corn flakes in an extreme, static close-up that reveals how little effort and love went into preparing and consuming the meal. Anna's uncontrollable brother no longer attends these now silent meals. In bed Eva hugs a stuffed animal rather than her mother, and in a long shot at a doctor's office waiting room, five people sit quietly waiting without speaking to each other more than salutations.

Georg finally writes to his parents, and the voiceover recitation of this letter contains perhaps more words than he speaks throughout the rest of the film, but the letter is a one-way monologue rather than an invitation to communication, a suicide note that can never be responded to because by the time it reaches his mother he and his family will be dead. The family runs through a checklist of removing themselves from society--withdrawing their money from the bank, excusing Eva from school, quitting their jobs, and selling their car--and they do this under the guise of moving to Australia. The implication is that Australia is the seventh continent of the title, but Australia is more properly the sixth continent. Antarctica is the seventh continent, a frozen, silent wasteland unfit for human survival. Georg and Anna, as frigid, fixed, and speechless as glaciers, are true Antarcticans, and it is to a frozen, barren hell that they prepare to disembark.

Even in death they are "systematic" and emotionally uninvested. Materialistic, they destroy the belongings that mean so much to them prior to destroying their physical selves--dismantling furniture, smashing electronics, ripping clothing, shredding books, records, papers, and photographs, cracking mirrors, and crushing clocks. In a society where the dress shirts you wear mean more than the body that they clothe, it is no longer sufficient to suicide to merely kill the body. One must also murder the accessories, and this murder is done with the same rigid, mechanical organization as all their other routines. As pristine as their actions are their emotions, which remain sterile throughout the complete disintegration of their lives. They do not discuss fears, regrets, or nostalgia. They do not discuss anything at all. When the phone rings, they dismantle it, and when the doorbell rings, they mute the doorbell. Only when Georg kills Eva's pet fish by smashing the aquarium with a sledge hammer do they exchange a few words, but at this point a few words cannot melt the icicles that have crystallized and hardened their souls.

They flush their cash, they have their last silent meal, and they drink poison while watching American pop music videos (ironically, "The Power of Love") on television--the one possession too important to destroy. Eva says her prayers and dies. Anna faces a death as messy as any life should be, though she tried so hard to keep it clean. And Georg, at last as literally alone as he has always metaphorically been, slips into unconsciousness while staring at television static. The chaotic static is a monitor that reveals the thoughts in his head, glimpses of all the people he could have interacted with but never did, all the moments that could have been meaningful but never were--the gas station attendant he could have chatted with, the brother-in-law he could've consoled, the retired boss he could have listened to, the strange dream he could've shared, the daughter he could have learned from, the wife he could've loved.

But these regrets are at best hunches, like flashes of inspiration that come to one in a dream but slip away in intangible threads when light strikes the eyes. In a society where dependence on humans and social interaction is not necessary and is sometimes detrimental to survival, where people work together but separately, always replaceable, and never deviating too far from the normal and productive center, Georg has never learned the language of emotion. These frantic impulses can no more be acted upon than a dream about flying.

Fear of death, of mess, of rejection, of heartache, of loneliness, of meaningless, and of failure forces us to dehumanize ourselves. If we latch on to a world of tangible, permanent objects, if we hoard these objects and make them an important, definitive part of who we are, then we can survive through their permanence much longer than one hundred and twenty years. If we keep them clean and well-polished, our lives can stay clean. If we dutifully fulfill the same obligations and behaviors every day, we can erase our sense of time and by erasing time we can erase our feeling that time is running out. If what we do today is the same as what we did yesterday and what we did the day before and what we will do tomorrow and the day after, then we can imagine that we are timeless, that we will always be able to do these things. If we keep ourselves constantly distracted with these routines and with television and with work, then we need never think about death or despair. People die and force us to think about our own eventual demise; even though we knew them day after day, eventually they ceased to be and so will we. Best not to have people in our lives. Best to keep our noses as close to grindstone as possible, lest the view from above be too terrifying and unfathomable.

Michael Haneke presents a portrait of life in our times that is prophetic and disturbing. With a methodical and exacting eye, he shows that our attempts to prolong life by not living too fully has made life nearly an extension of death. The actions of the family in the third act remind me of people preserving their own tombs and preparing their own bodies for purification and mummification, like a newborn infant crawling into a jar of formaldehyde to stave off decay. Decay, messiness, pain, and death are the price of action, meaning, love, and life. Better to burn brightly and briefly than never to light the flame at all. Through his brutal examination of emotional frigidity, meaningless existence, and alienation, Haneke exorts us all to reenter the realm of the living.

Der Siebente Kontinent isn't on the TSPDT? list of the greatest movies of all time. In fact, none of Haneke's films are. But this one, at least, certainly should be.

Der Siebente Kontinent (1989)
d: Michael Haneke w: Michael Haneke, Johanna Teicht
(Birgit Doll, Dieter Berner, Leni Tanzer)
9/10